Hear me out: "Climate change" is a terrible phrase, of course climate changes, when talking to regular people that's like saying "water flow" to describe flooding. "Climate destabilization" or something akin to that would communicate what is happening better to the people that vote.
I don't disagree with the thrust of your point, but the same argument you make against 'climate change' could also be made against 'climate destabilizaiton', since destabilization can have human and non-human causes (for example, the rise of plant life, asteroids, or the periodic advancement and retreat of the glaciers)..
The first term in the list above seems to capture the point a bit better, since 'inadvertent' strongly implies human agency is involved.
In practice, 'human caused' is implied in the terms 'global warming' and 'climate change'. For my money it's better to stick with those terms, and add 'anthropogenic' if there is potential for confusion.
A lot of people (anti-vaxx types) don't buy it because of supposed incorrect past predictions bu science, they believe science is misinterpreting the cause of the change, so it is important to emphasize that you are not unsure about the cause and it is a very serious thing. Most people believe things when people they trust say so, since they know they lack the expertise themselves. So getting important people, politicians, celebrities use the best possible term I think is crucial.
It's symptomatic of the fuzzy thinking that tends to infect the area and this article especially. Of course the Earth's climate has been changing ever since it formed, some billions of years before capitalism. You can't really fix 'climate change' for that reason and that it's not really a measurable thing though if you say wanted to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere you could put a price on releasing or removing CO2 and capitalism would roar ahead on doing that.
Is every form of industrialization, from the USSR to the UK to the US to China, capitalist?
Is the current energy transition, funded by massive amounts of capital, and the result of industrialization of technology, somehow less capitalistic?
Are the ESG efforts somehow less capitalist?
Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years.
> Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis.
You know what else is grow-or-die? Life itself. All of life is a series of exponential growth, followed by slower growth. It's all logistic curves.
This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism.
I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph.
Essays like this degrade the critique of capitalism into nonsense, ultimately weakening any attempt to change the system, because they discredit the idea that there are actually lots of legitimate critiques of the system. They also cheapen critique by broadening the definition to basically "what I don't like at any given moment."
All of life is ever changing, there is no stable ecosystem except in a moment, and only if you ignore the parts that are undergoing massive death after massive growth. Calling bacteria in a Petri dish "pathological" doesn't even make sense, it is the way of life, how life grows all over.
Disease and escape from disease are omni-present in biology, not mere pathology. Ever present extinction of species, ever present evolution of species, ever present birth and death of individuals, all make real life an ever-changing unbalanced dynamic. Life is ever changing, ever "growing" yet somehow always dying.
Follow the simple population models in biology, and you get chaotic boom and bust, feast and famine.
"Capitalism" is the same as biology here. Claims of requirements of ever-present growth are a factual. Capitalism survives recessions, depressions, just fine. There is no requirement of global growth for capitalism to survive, and the supposed "logic" that leads to that conclusion is ridiculous, full of holes. For the past decades, even the supposed "capitalism needs ever expanding amounts of energy" has been proven to be false. GDP is not tied to energy, GDP is tied to whatever humans value. Which is ever changing, ever evolving.
I think that the critique of capitalism embodied in this essay is a century too old. It misses the basic understanding of the past 100 years of biological discovery and better understanding of complex systems that happened not only in biology, but in many other academic fields.
Life persists even with individual species continually expanding exponentially until they hit population collapse. Capitalism is the same. And even relegating capitalism to only the "completely unregulated" system, whatever that means (all property rights exist within a legal system with regulation), capitalism does not tends towards ever-present monopolies. That at best leads to feudalism, to autocracy like in Russia, but feudalism/autocracy is itself unstable.
There’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism. Like capitalism, socialism needs working adults to outnumber both retired seniors and non working age children. The only way socialism can avoid the constant growth requirement is if they have a “you only eat if you work” rule. Historically, socialism’s rate of pollution is on par with capitalism
> There’s no denying that capitalism is “grow or die”, but so is socialism.
I think it's important to specify about what individual components "grow-or-die" here, because I'm having trouble agreeing that capitalism or socialism, as systems, are such.
Individual entities in capitalism, embodied in the concept of the firm, are not necessarily grow-or-die. A growing firm has a much easier life, as there is more slack in all parts of the system, and they can be less efficient in their allocation of resources. But a stagnant firm does not necessarily die. An accountant that is growing, or even shrinking, is not doomed to be replaced by another, growing accountant. Large firms can be stagnant for generations without dying. IBM is still around, right?
And similarly, even if a firm is growing massively, accumulating capital and collecting surplus value, that doesn't mean that the GDP as a whole is growing, because so many other large firms could be contracting.
The question of how the retired class of people eats, and how to distribute resources between younger workers and elder retirees is solvable in many ways, under socialism and under capitalism. Many of China's problems stem from inadequate retirement distribution, despite supposedly being a socialist or communist country.
This is why I feel that these discussions are completely pointless, our abstractions are no longer useful for describing the material reality of people. And we get ridiculous articles like the original post here that cod not even provide an adequate definition of capitalism to describe what they are talking about.
Its all monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, IMHO, pointless discussions disconnected from reality.
Your argument is not accounting for factors such as inflation, fiat, and leverage to name a few. No one is going to invest in anything that doesn’t have a decent ROI
> Many of China's problems stem from inadequate retirement distribution, despite supposedly being a socialist or communist country.
China hasn’t been socialist for decades now. I’m not even sure what your point is. It has “inadequate” retirement distribution because
1. It’s a drag on the economy and growth
2. Like nearly every other country, China has a demographic problem: the proportion of the retired elderly vs the taxable, working population is not sustainable ie there are too many elderly people who are not contributing to both the economy and tax revenue
> The question of how the retired class of people eats, and how to distribute resources between younger workers and elder retirees is solvable in many ways, under socialism and under capitalism.
I feel that describing the so called “solutions” is important here instead of assuming that it will magically automatically just intuitively work. It’s not an easy or straightforward problem to solve
This is only a pointless discussion for people who lack enough knowledge of both history and economics
I'm happy to deny capitalism is "grow or die" because it's basically rubbish. Look at some basically stable capitalist country like Switzerland. I'm sure there is some growth but even if it doesn't grow the trains would still run on time, people have food houses etc.
I think its important to recognize that right at the top of the capitalist pyramid, where the money is all ultimately flowing, is people. And people, unlike companies, can do whatever they like with their money. They don't need to grow or die at all.
They can choose to spend it on fixing our societies problems, or they can piss it away on Champagne and Caviar.
That’s not true due to the system and its forces like inflation. Mix in our social safety nets and you’ll realize that our mixed economies are highly reliant on growth unless you want to end social security, Medicare, and (for non-US developed nations) universal healthcare. You still need growth even if you’re not “pissing it all away on champagne and caviar” ie the proportion of working, taxable adults needs to greatly outnumber retired senior citizens who keep living longer and longer, while couples keep having less and less children
There are a lot of people proposing models of economic development that don't necessarily rely on growth.
There's a lot of work done on degrowth and similar modes of production. Though I haven't really read too much into it (just getting into this topic recently) a lot of the authors are staunch critics of capitalism so it leads me to believe that there are other systems out there that aren't necessarily capitalists and probably align with socialism much more.
Just to give a brief example, think about private ownership of a firm versus worker ownership of it and how it would change the way that firm approaches pollution. In the first it is very easy for the owners to be detached from the pollution they produce as they can simply move to another city without the firm really be affected in any way. Whereas in the second one it wouldn't be possible for workers to move as they would be unable to continue working, so pollution affects them and their families directly in which case there are much stronger incentives for them to cut profits in order to greenify their production. First is a capitalist mode of production, second is a socialist one.
Imo co-ops aren’t socialist because it’s not directly controlled by a government. They also already exist and thrive in modern mixed capitalist economies
The government controlling production is not all there is to socialism, at all. Markets are not an exclusive feature of capitalism.
In very simple terms, the economy from a leftist perspective can be separated into two areas: distribution and ownership. If you have private ownership and markets then you have the current system; capitalism, if you have state ownership and markets then you have the system that China has. If you have worker ownership (co-ops) and markets then you have a system that actually has a name: market socialism.
Of course every economic system has lots of pockets of different things inside it, the economies of walmart and amazon for example work, internally, through planning. So even in our market system we still have pockets of central-planning. But to me at least, the fundamental characteristic of the capitalist system is precisely ownership and the power relationships that come with ownership. So although co-ops exist in capitalism, imo, they're the seeds of new forms to come.
China does not currently have a socialist system. Socialist systems do not feature either markets or private ownership. Both markets and private ownership of property are features of capitalism. At best China has a mixed system which primarily features capitalism despite some centralized planning
Meanwhile, if you ask the interviewee what he thinks about the billions of people who gained access to basic amenities like running water, electricity, and antibiotics, he'd dismiss that capitalism had anything to do with this.
> I can't read this thing without thinking "really? Where is your critical thinking?" About every single paragraph.
A lack of critical thinking is a feature. They want loyal followers to help them overthrow the current system. Whether the new system is actually more egalitarian is secondary to the fact that they would sit on the top.
> This idea that capitalism is all growth is a very simple-minded and inaccurate view of capitalism. It's also the death of firms. It's stagnation. Its fortunes squandered, in addition to fortunes built.
Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption.
Yes, some companies die, and that's part of capitalism as envisioned by Adam Smith, but the companies that survive are the ones that are able to produce products cheaper, usually by producing more, by consuming more energy.
> Sometimes, our mental frames are traps rather than tools for understanding the world. This essay makes me think that this person is quite trapped, unable to absorb or explain climate action of the past 30 years.
> Don't get me wrong, I don't think that capitalism is the be-all end-all system, but these critiques are so weak as to block any chance at actually fixing the many many problems of capitalism.
We have failed to do anything about climate change within the system of capitalism in the past 30 years, so isn't it the people who refuse to consider the possibility that it's a problem that capitalism is unable to address who may be trapped in a mental frame?
Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe.
Also capitalism is about efficient allocation of capital. It really doesn't require growth of the economy as a whole (imho). Sure it encourages innovation and growth of new ideas, but that is usually at the expense of stagnating and old ideas.
> Energy is the lifeblood of humanity. We can't demonize it, the only path forward is to embrace it and find a way to utilize the near infinite energy available to us in the universe in a fashion that is environmentally safe.
I didn't say that energy was bad. What I wrote was
> Capitalism incentivizes increased economic output, which incentivizes increased energy consumption. Barring regulations to internalize the externalities of co2 emissions, this means it incentivizes increased fossil fuel consumption.
I think you may have overlooked the part in italics.
In other words, capitalism incentivizes energy consumption. This is okay. But it's now important to regulate co2 emissions in a way where energy that does not produce co2 emissions is consumed.
(However, the reality is that capitalism is also having difficulty doing that.)
I guess I was just saying that humans incentivize energy consumption, not capitalism. Capitalism maybe just facilitates it since that is what people want? That was my premise.
>the nature and logic of capitalism, understood as a system directed at the accumulation of capital.
Capitalism is about a lot more than accumulation of capital.
How about deployment of capital? Markets?
>Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis. The answer of the system is to boost accumulation.
Doesn't have to be
>speak of economic growth as a principal problem, and of the need for a steady-state economy as a solution
This I agree with but it's easier to conceptualize with a stable world population flourishing at a level where renewable resources are abundant.
>For capitalism, accumulation of capital is everything
This is a repeating theme, at one extreme
A political frame of mind may be socialist, communist, democratic, or things like that whether or not there is capitalism involved.
Even though people say there is always money in politics, there doesn't have to be either. Any of these different political systems could exist or function without money if people tried hard enough. It surely would be a way different civilization, so unfamiliar to us that it would be shocking. But maybe not that unfamiliar to more than one of the lost civilizations of many bygone millennia.
Now for capitalism you really do need money, other people's money to be specific. It's economic, not absolutlely required to be political either even though that's how it turned out to most people's experience.
As we see in democratic, socialist, and communist political systems, there are so often greedy capitalists who accumulate but do not leverage to produce or add real value. All suffer as the wealth needed to feed the accumulation is sucked out of the overall "economy".
Yeah, you need money to be a capitalist, but so many times almost nobody has enough so they mostly really "need money badly" for survival even if they are not greedy by nature.
OTOH many major worthwhile projects could never be achieved without excessive accumulation, which should ideally be leveraged into value added.
Greed is the fundamental problem to me more than capitalism itself, that's where the accumulation amounts to value consumed rather than value produced. One is positive, the other negative, once you get a critical mass of greed you can be sure many major worthwhile projects will never be achieved.
Regardless, different currencies have different environmental impacts.
It's not just the energy and raw materials that went into your EV that makes it have a bigger carbon footprint relative to the motor fuel savings. The money you have to earn and the work you have to do to pay for the thing bring the total up even more when it comes to environmental cost. The same consumer item can have a way different cost for different people.
COVID lockdowns didn't put a dent in climate change and caused immense suffering - and they were pretty tame for a "lockdown". We'd have to make suffering much, much worse, and permanent, to have any effect whatsoever.
This will never happen. Until there's an energy source that's more abundant than fossil fuels at the same or lower cost, this is just how it is going to be. Better to worry about how to adapt.
Are personal vehicles are significant chunk of pollution? At any rate, lockdowns were a good glimpse of how much nicer things are without all the cars around.
> This will never happen . [...] Better to worry about how to adapt.
In ecology, there's talk of population boom/bust cycles that result from biome variation, like a predator going away. This results in more members of a given species than can be supported by the rest of the biome.
Then comes the bust.
In human terms, adapting is probably mostly about hoping the right warlord owns you.
> Soviet-type societies were destructive of the environment on a level comparable to the West, and turned into repressive class societies sui generis (of their own type).
Indeed Russia had an explosion of greenhouse gas emissions during the Soviet period that it hasn’t equaled in the 3 decades since. [1] So this article reads like anti-capitalist propaganda that explicitly blames capitalism except when it briefly and begrudgingly mentions the Soviets who weren’t real socialists like the author.
Nah, capitalism is just the most efficient system for economic growth. It's economic growth that's driving climate change, and economic growth is driven by population growth, reduction in poverty, and the hedonistic treadmill. It doesn't matter what -ism you put on it, climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels and every -ism would do the same. Fossil fuels are a very decentralized incentive problem; they are everywhere, the externalities aren't felt locally, and not until much later. The consequences that would change behavior just aren't there, and consequences are the only thing that changes behavior.
The valuing of economic growth seems to be almost required as a Darwinian feature of nations. Resolve as a nation to value economic growth less than your neighbors, and you will soon be overpowered by them.
Ah yes, truly an easy sell. Let's try telling that to the developing nations who's people are just getting access to clean water, electricity, refrigeration and transportation first.
I don't disagree, but I think the Darwinian part transcends the idea of incentives. You wouldn't say that a tree has an incentive to reproduce, as a byproduct of a Darwinian natural selection they are guaranteed to have that property. Similarly, civilizations that have economic activity are guaranteed (in a Darwinian sense) to have economic growth.
Have you been to small villages in developing countries? Their lives revolve around capitalism and local markets. Everyone knows each other. I've never seen more "neighborly" places
I don't see your point? I didn't say that capitalism leads to conflict, merely that not pursuing economic growth should lead to being overwhelmed by those that do.
The slow, halting pace at which we are addressing climate change is the product of human stupidity and selfishness, as well as the immense difficulty of rebuilding our energy infrastructure from scratch. None of that is inherent to capitalism.
Show me a non-capitalist country that is combatting climate change better than a capitalist country. Countries that don't emit because they're poor don't count.
The closest thing to an example is France. And France does relatively well among developed countries because it has nuclear power, not because it is non-capitalist.
They're all funded through government intervention for non-market reasons. The general trend is for more private intervention leading to them being less successful and more likely not to even be built. The EDF was a public entity when they built most of their reactors, and Flamanville was an absolute debacle.
Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of building for the future and paying for its externalities in the way required to build safe nuclear power. This is exactly the same problem that leads to climate change.
Thankfully we have solar panels which are compatable with capitalism.
I agree that government is needed for the biggest "capital" expenditures. Separate point from the article, which is just more cliche "once we somehow stop believing in the capitalism ideology (and believe in my preferred ideology instead) people will stop being bad and there will be sunshine and rainbows"
No. It's the same point. Capitalism is fundamentally incompatable with the commons, long term good, managing externalities, or wellbeing for all. If we don't control capital it will continue exactly the same destruction it always has.
How we do that and to what extent is an open question, but first we have to acknowledge the reality of problems that markets are the wrong tool for.
The mainstream developed country view is to regulate capitalism and have government fund big bets and basic research, not dismiss capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with everything we're supposed to value.
This is a motte and bailey argument. "Only capatalist countries can stop climate change and they can do it by being not-capitalist just long enough to stem the bleeding"
The solution by your own words is to have less capitalism. Which is what everyone else is arguing for.
If anything, the motte-and-bailey shoe seems to be on the other foot from my end. You claim capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with many aspects of human flourishing, then provide as evidence countries which are widely thought to be capitalist (and think of themselves as capitalist), but regulate the capitalism.
I don't know if there's a meaningful, concrete difference of views worth discussing here anymore. We both agree capitalism should be regulated and can't make the biggest, riskiest investments society needs.
Maybe we could put it this way - is capitalism like arsenic, a useless toxin that the human body shouldn't be exposed to, or is it like iron, something that can be poisonous in excess but also serves a critical function?
That would be a valid analogy if it wasn't self-reenforcing to the point where it destroys whatever mechanism of regulation you have, and if any limitations on it weren't attacked by comparing them to failed state capitalist or fascist states and attributing everything good that happend under or in spite of it to capitalism.
The broken part is assigning power to power. This has an identical outcome whether you call the nexus of power money or favour of the people's party.
Sufficiently regulated capitalism is less like a modern neoliberal system than the USSR or a totalitarian regime.
There's no evidence it has done any good that doesn't follow from any other type of industrialisation or access to the fruits of science (it may), but there are a great number of problems it does cause and a number of problems it is fundamentally unsuited for. So more like ethanol -- might do some good, but definitely does a lot of harm if you have too much.
I'm sure Russia and China are paragons of clean energy. Presupposition that this is capitalism's fault is ridiculous from the get go.
It is the unchecked human instinct to drive the Machine of Progress forward that is at fault, and neither anti-capitalist narratives nor ESG idolatry is going to capture that out of the air. We are broken on a far more fundamental level - we just acquired the technology for that fact to manifest itself at global scale.
We all want to find a bogeyman to pin climate change on. Especially if that bogeyman is someone we already like hating. Popular targets of hate which might be compatible include: capitalism, corporations, oil companies, our government, someone else's government, and someone else's generation.
But, if you choose to frame it in terms of guilt, the truth is we are all "guilty". We all benefited from it. Some definitely share more guilt than others, but honestly we let many of them get away with it on purpose so we could get the benefits.
Internal combustion engines (and before that external combustion engines) are how industrialization happened. It's how we got to our current level of development. We, the human race, used energy to lift ourselves out of what we'd now consider poverty, and we created that energy by burning whatever we could get our hands on that would burn. And I really think there was no other way at the time.
If you are able to read this message through the magic of the internet, or if you have access to a reliable source of food and some choice of what to eat, or if you're wearing clothes you didn't sew yourself, or if you received modern healthcare, or if you lived in a society that was prosperous enough that it could give you an education, all that was to a large degree made possible by the industrial revolution and fossil fuels.
What's more, if you have a solar panel on your roof, or if you are able to buy electricity that comes from wind energy, or if you drive an electric car, all of that was also made possible by fossil fuels. Clean technology didn't invent itself. We had to get to the point where we could invent it, and that is the result of humanity having the resources available for centuries to invest in developing science, math, engineering, and manufacturing.
Now, of course, we've put ourselves in a situation which is unsustainable, and we have to move on to the next phase and basically discard half the world's infrastructure and start over. It absolutely has to be done, but it's going to be crazy expensive and disruptive, and that's a tough pill to swallow. But making it about guilt and blame doesn't actually help get it done. The only thing it does is help you feel better if you believe the guilt rests on someone else. You can tell yourself, "We're screwed, but it's not my fault." Even if it's true, the value of that consolation prize isn't much.
The cutting of most European forests happened very recently, in the time between the start of industrial revolution and the creation of natural reserves and national parks.
This depends on where in europe. The various sea powers that were over history stripped plenty of islands and coastal Mediterranean areas bare of their forests for the sake of building ships that went on to rot in the sea. Roman sources tell of crops that were harvested to the point of extinction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
Its not a problem but a fact of life. Symbiotic relationships are most commonly parasitic. It takes a lot of evolutionary fine tuning for a mutually beneficial system to emerge. Plenty of things have gone extinct over the course of life due to other species doing. Perhaps the worst event was the great oxygenation event, when photosynthetic life emerged and polluted the earth with oxygen to the point of mass extinction of the previously dominant anaerobic life forms.
We humans are no different than what came before. We are a parasite to most species we rely upon. We pollute the air to the point that it harms other species much like earlier forms of life have done. Solving this 'problem' for good will amount to an evolutionary change in our species. I say problem in quotes because its only a problem for humans and any of the current crop of species making up the biomass on earth who are harmed by our actions. Extinction exposes opportunities for other phenotypes or species to take advantage of the earths resources at least. One thing that is certain is that life on earth moves on as always.
> This seems to be a more general problem than something which is the result of capitalism
Sure, but the point is that dismantling of ecosystems is capitalism's central organising principle. It's what capitalism is: denote sophisticated evolved ecosystems as "property" rather than world, then allow the "owners" to dismantle them to create crude technological systems that require ongoing inputs from the outputs of prior evolved systems. The process of converting evolved ecosystems into technological ones is economic 'growth' - a mislabel for a 2 to 3 century process that can end only with the death of the living planet, or of capitalism, whichever comes first.
This is pure ideology, nothing more than a religious screed. I’m not sure how people can not see this. If this were a fundamentalist Christian tirade against the decay of the “family” and the “gay agenda” it would be completely obvious.
Stuff like this is the main reason I was once a big climate change skeptic. I read stuff like this and it convinced me the whole thing was just religious apologetics. "Forgive me nature for I have sinned..." Over the time I was convinced by the evidence but also by hearing people talk about it outside this ideological framework.
Nature is simply that which is. Trees are nature and microchips are nature. Any division between that which is natural and that which is “artificial” is purely a human construction. An alien observing Earth would only see living systems and products of living systems and would see no intrinsic difference between a termite mound and a highway other than what apparently built it.
There is of course a very legitimate argument for care and restraint in our use of this planet’s resources, but that’s because it affects us. “Nature” doesn’t care. The Earth existed for billions of years before us and it will exist for billions of years after us.
The exploitation of nature in unsustainable ways is not a feature of any one political system. Humans have been doing it since there have been humans. Learning to live in a more sustainable manner is a goal that we only recently even named and started discussing.
> stuff like this is the main reason I was once a big climate change skeptic
That's the only ideological/religious (or perhaps more properly identitarian) statement here. Rather than assess statements about physical reality, you choose to follow your emotional reactions to what people you associate with a movement are saying (or what you interpret them as saying). Even if I had mentioned climate change (which I didn't) and my argument was just rubbish or purely ideological, what could that possibly have to do with your assessment of the gamut of climate change science? Why would you let commenters you don't respect affect your assessments of science? It's precisely the same "argument" forwarded by people who dismiss climate science because they don't like a US politician who once made a film about climate change. Emotional reactivity, nothing more.
> Nature is simply that which is.
Who mentioned 'nature'? Unless you're a metaphysical dualist, it's a concept we can ditch. It's really only of use to marketers.
I'm talking about the planetary entropy increase caused by dismantling complex systems, evolved over thousands of years, to build crude technological ones, and falsely using the metaphor of 'growth' to describe this destructuring process. All this happens within 'nature', if you insist on the term.
Viewed as a physical process (ie. ignoring its own virtual economic self-descriptions which are as unrelated to physical processes as are those of theology), this is what capitalism is.
I think you are conflating a few things. The idea of property came into existence long before capitalism, which seems to be the linchpin of your take. Are you suggesting we return to being hunter gatherers? If not, I’m not sure what you are proposing.
The modern capitalist concept of property is abstracted a long way from its roots.
> Are you suggesting we return to being hunter gatherers? If not, I’m not sure what you are proposing.
I'm not proposing anything. I'm just describing our current system of organising the world, but in physical rather than the usual virtual terms. As a physical process, our current political/economic systems are dismantling the systems we live within. That doesn't mean I (not being a Nobel prize candidate!) could magically come up with a system to manage billions of people and an entire planet! I'm not particularly sanguine about anyone (or any collective) being able to. The destructive mechanisms are pushing us into emergency territory requiring fairly quick action, and H. Sapiens' cognitive/affective/conative capacities don't seem well adapted to the task of managing an entire planet. Given that evolution can't anticipate, why would they be?
I think you are implying that it’s “the modern system” that’s ruining the world. What’s the possibility that it’s just human nature, and the system is kinda secondary?
I would guess that's unknowable. The old proximate vs distal cause problem is hard enough for simple cases, let alone something like the interactions between thousands of ecosystems, 7 billion chunks of primate psychology, and global civilisation. I am sure that capitalism is incompatible with the continuing existence of healthy living ecosystems. So (for me) your question comes down to: is capitalism inevitable (& even if it wasn't, are we now stuck with it for historical reasons?).
We can look at some things that seem salient. When you look at human societies over time and space, the vast differences in cultures are astonishing. Most people have little idea of just how different cultures have been, so their concept of 'human nature' actually just labels their own culture (I'm not suggesting that's how you're using 'human nature'). Even the subset of contemporary 'capitalist' nations are greatly variable, not the least in their levels of ecosystem destruction.
Then capitalism itself, variation notwithstanding, does depend on the metaphor of growth (I insist on 'metaphor' because nothing defensibly 'grows' in the process of deconstructing complex evolved circular systems to build simple technological ones requiring ongoing inputs). Some think this can be fixed by building 'circular economies', but I've seen nothing to suggest that this is possible at all, let alone on a relevant timescale.
We know for certain that the 'growth' metaphor/ideology doesn't spring cleanly/directly from human nature, as there's no shortage of human societies that have lived in a relatively steady relationship with their environment (here in Australia for 60,000 years or more).
So who knows? Perhaps H. Sapiens can get free of the system it has made, perhaps not. If it can, it's not going to be in a hurry, so we'd need to slow down the rate of destruction while still capitalists. I do think that's possible with appropriate application of tech, "electrify everything", tough corporate regulation, land set-asides, urban greening, etc. But because of compounding, even slow dismantling of ecosystems eventually destroys them. So H Sapiens still needs to ditch capitalism at some point.
There's certainly no guarantee that it can, because evolution, in making the species, wasn't looking to the future (and certainly not to a destiny).
“ We know for certain that the 'growth' metaphor/ideology doesn't spring cleanly/directly from human nature, as there's no shortage of human societies that have lived in a relatively steady relationship with their environment (here in Australia for 60,000 years or more).”
In all seriousness, what societies that aren’t “hunter gatherers” or migratory that have lived in a steady state with their environment? Also, how do you define capitalism? I think we probably agree about some of the flaws of capitalism that need to change, for example infinite exponential growth, but I am very much against any kind of centrally planned system and I know of no other system that doesn’t ultimately succumb to the human desire to chase social status and ultimately excess that I would want to live in. Pre-industrial migratory societies don’t really count in my mind as a real alternative this challenge and I don’t think this problem is limited to or is driven by “capitalism”.
> what societies that aren’t “hunter gatherers” or migratory that have lived in a steady state with their environment?
The majority of indigenous Australian nations were not hunter-gatherers, though all did include hunting and gathering amongst their food production techniques to varying degrees. Though I don't see the relevance of the question. In any case, a 60,000 year civilisation not involving much in the way of capitalism seems to at least point to the possibility that what many contemporaries imagine from their very limited experience of the varieties of human experience to be 'human nature' is, in fact, merely a description of their own local culture.
> Also, how do you define capitalism?
While I find definitions to be rarely useful for physical-world concepts, capitalism to me is the system of political economy based on 'growth'. I also believe that the word 'growth' is a sort of misleading metaphor, supervening over the physical process of increasing entropy by converting complex evolved systems into cruder technological ones. There's a small academic literature on the question of whether or not capitalism does, in fact, require growth. I find the pro case convincing. You'll have to make your own judgement (given the existing literature it's not worth litigating here). I think this dependence on fake 'growth' is what most characteristically distinguishes capitalism from other ways of organising society.
> I am very much against any kind of centrally planned system
So the 3 categories of organising society you consider to contain the universe of possibilities is 'hunter-gatherer', 'capitalist' and 'centrally planned'. That's it, is it? For ever? For all our history to date?
In any case it doesn't matter much what you or me are 'for' or 'against'. That's just punditry. My contention is about the physical world. I think capitalism is literally incompatible with the long-term continuing existence of a healthy living planet. But as all H. Sapiens that I am aware of are mammals, therefore are dependent on ecosystems, capitalism literally cannot continue. So it won't. It's not among the set of long-term possibilities, regardless of political wishes or preferences.
“ In any case, a 60,000 year civilisation not involving much in the way of capitalism seems to at least point to the possibility that what many contemporaries imagine from their very limited experience of the varieties of human experience to be 'human nature' is, in fact, merely a description of their own local culture.”
I’m not sure about that conclusion, which is why I was asking for an example so I can read up on it. My main question is what caused them to not grow exponentially? In most non industrial societies it was higher mortality than modern life, and I really doubt that’s something people want to return to. But I’m not familiar with the cultures you mentioned and will look into it. Curious if you have a point of view on what limited their growth.
My main point is that I think capitalism is somewhat irrelevant to this issue. I don’t think this problem originated with capitalism and I don’t think the main driver is capitalism.
I also see rays of hope.
1) birth rates have been going down heavily in modern industrial societies. Without immigration America’s population would be growing very much. Economists freak out about this, but it may force the change in our system we both seem to want.
2) we might innovate our way out. I would not want to bet solely on this like many others do, but it’s certainly a possible.
Regarding human nature, I believe the evidence is rather strong that we are wired to reproduce as much as possible through natural selection. And that we are wired to seek high social status because it leads to higher reproduction. I.e. we are wired for growth.
I realise now we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm not talking about population growth, which is not really relevant to the problems at hand - ecosystems are being crashed in regions without increasing populations. Population increase is an orthogonal, and largely solved, issue. Population control (from infanticide, to surgical, to herbal and chemical) has been the human norm for many thousands of years in many populations.
What's distinctive about capitalism, and what makes it a physically impossible system to maintain long-term, is its central conception of economic (ie. fake) "growth". Capitalism collapses without it, yet 'it' (described as a physical system) just is the dismantling of ecosystems. Any political economy might cause ecosystem damage; capitalism must, always.
To put it in the strongest possible way: a population of capitalists fixed as a steady-state population of 1,000, would eventually (perhaps in a few millennia) destroy all ecosystems on the planet. Economic "growth" (ie. the conversion of complex evolved circular living systems into simple input-demanding technological non-living ones) leads there, ineluctably.
> I really doubt that’s something people want to return to.
Political punditry again. None of what I'm suggesting has anything to do with what anyone 'wants'. It's what's physically possible. Capitalism is incompatible with the long-term health of ecosystems (because its 'growth' is identical with their dismantling). Capitalism is an activity of humans. Humans are mammals, which depend on healthy ecosystems. Therefore capitalism will not continue (regardless of what anyone thinks they 'want').
> the evidence is rather strong that we are wired to reproduce as much as possible through natural selection
Yet population control is one of the great human universals, and is chosen by many, perhaps most, populations when the option is there (and remember, what removes the option is generally culture, or lack of communal provision for old age).
> we are wired to seek high social status
This may be true (though the evidence is nowhere near sufficient to merit a bluff term like 'wired'). But what confers social status is utterly cultural and plastic. Social status can be conferred by age, or cattle, or kindness, or kids, or palaces, or wisdom, or beauty, or emotional continence, or the gift of the gab (and has taken all of these forms, in real societies). It has no inherent nature. Thinking of human nature is fixed to what we know of our local culture is a strong feature of those in empires, because they become so insulated from the huge range of real human variations that have existed.
It’s clear you have an ax to grind against the term capitalism which is quite uninteresting. Environmental degradation is not limited to, or primarily occurring in, capitalist societies unless you define the term so weirdly as to be meaningless. Economic growth to a significant degree has been decoupled from resource usage, and population growth is not solved: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
> It’s clear you have an ax to grind against the term capitalism
I have no idea what that means. I think you're mixing up political/policy punditry with descriptions of how the physical world actually works. The two are different (and often only very vaguely related).
> Environmental degradation is not limited to, or primarily occurring in, capitalist societies
Not relevant here (as it's not a claim I make).
> Economic growth to a significant degree has been decoupled from resource usage
Not even close, and 'resource usage' isn't the salient concept here.
> population growth is not solved
Population growth drops, (perhaps too far - to below replacement), everywhere with decent social security and health provision (where the latter includes birth control).
> The idea of property came into existence long before capitalism, which seems to be the linchpin of your take.
That is not what I understood. I understood a simplified definition of property under modern capitalism. Capitalist property value is overwhelmingly limited to physical utility and not to consequence of consumption. There are a few exceptions, in various countries and industry, notwithstanding.
I did not see a suggestion as to what to do about this.
Prior to capitalism, I know of no system where “consequence of consumption” was a major aspect of the system. I’m trying to figure out where capitalism becomes a factor here.
Capitalism is a composition of prior cognitive ideas. A required parameter is value assignment in relative to some shared value store.
The root of the problem is assigning authority to a minority. Consolidation of logistics has real resource wins, but we keep empowering grown children who think they’re beating a direct path to Star Trek TNG, or some other vague “greater good”, usually wrapped in memes of forever human prosperity and expansion. Never mind no theory of science says it’s actually achievable with the resources available on Earth. The morality of handing an aristocracies demands of fealty off to the future is suspect as well. I’m sure it’s merely a coincidence billions are spent selling that hype. Oh wait, behavioral economics is the intentional study of manufacturing consent; we manipulate the quirks of biology religion happened upon. My mistake.
Giving stocks value relative to dollars is optional. Let them keep ownership via ephemeral objects. I don’t think Tesla or MS shares are worth anything. But I’m trapped in a police state where my agency has to comply with the billions who believe otherwise.
> Until about 215 million years ago, the Triassic period had experienced extremely high CO2 levels, at around 4,000 parts per million — about 10 times higher than today. But between 215 and 212 million years ago, the CO2 concentration halved, dropping to about 2,000ppm.
Nor would something equivalent to the asteroid that caused the last mass extinction
The two things I know of are a solar flare that blows away the atmosphere and an astroid large enough to cause the surface to liquify (into molton rock)
> astroid large enough to cause the surface to liquify (into molton rock)
Well, asteroid collisions follow a power law; the bigger the collision, the less often they happen. They get rarer the older the solar system gets, as they are consumed (AFAWCT).
But asteroids aren't self-replicating and they don't tell themselves how moral it is to eat everything in sight for the sake of some three letter acronym called GDP.
It is a bit of a semantic dispute, but not an unimportant one.
We are causing a major extinction event that is up there with the worst ones the Earth has experienced. That said, the end result is likely to be that we either go extinct or come very close and the remaining life on Earth picks up the pieces and starts re-evolving new biodiversity from the diversity bottleneck.
It's happened before and life on Earth, as whole, will come out the other side of this bottleneck and move on (unless we've tripped some unimaginable feedback loop).
...it's just likely we won't be included in that life.
...and a major extinction event on this scale is nothing to sneeze at either. Really it's chilling enough that we, as a species, are potentially having a similar impact on Earth's biodiversity as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. There's really no need to exaggerate that.
Even a completely 'trashed' earth that renders billions displaced or suffering amidst ecological catastrophe is still infinitely more hospitable to life than celestial bodies that are completely devoid of that benefit in the first place.
I was responding to the op saying that humans face extinction. I don't think that true. I think we could have the tech to live in "moon bases" here on earth once it has been rendered a desolate rock. And yes, billions will die.
But more pragmatically, neither Biosphere project was considered successful enough to make this workable on earth at any large, or even small, scale. There is still much more work and research to do here. Any attempt here currently has a hard dependency on the larger ecosystem to supply it with inputs.
Musk working on building moonbases on earth looks a lot like what doomday preppers are already focused on.
Unlike the other instances, we have the potential to reverse the trend. Blaming capitalism does not help, it's just how we organize economically, to which there is no known better alternative
Why should there be? The only reason I can think of is if you have a prior religious/metaphysical belief in a specific species (in this case H. Sapiens) having a 'destiny'. If OTOH you see species as contingently arising, well, then: they come, they change, and sometimes they overrun, and go.
Yes indeed.
Capitalism is novel in as much as it actually puts a value on many more things than other economic systems, so
you could even say that it could set the fair Net Present Value of growing a tree, or of scrubbing CO2 to stay below 400ppn: what time-discount should be applied, what level of risk is acceptable for whom (any Pakistanis here?) are just input variables...
Which is why regulation is important for capitalism to work correctly. Regulation is used to capture values outside of economic gains.
Maybe the goal of economic gains help accelerate climate change, but what is clear is that we need economic strength to solve this problem. The most successful method we know of for generating economic growth is capitalism.
Capitalism just values what people value. If nature is worth more as a tourist attraction than a farm, that is what it will be.
I am not making excuses for capitalism here. I am just saying: you can either overthrow global capitalism and replace it with some new perfect system no one knows about yet OR we can start valuing different things as a society...
The problem is that capitalism naturally "takes advantage" of weaknesses in human decision-making, especially around being abstracted from consequences (by time, space, complex routing, etc etc), that even the very humans in question frequently agree should not be the way it works.
That's just one of several problems. Another one is that economic systems often tell people what to value, and what products to associate with what feelings. People rarely start smoking because they like the taste or sensation.
But a person's values do not fully or directly translate through their consumer habits, and then through the actions of those higher up along the chain. There is a common fallacy that strong proponents of capitalism, especially free markets, believe in (or pretend to), which essentially goes: If you patronize x, you either condone all negative consequences of x's actions, or you're ignorant/hypocritical, and further, if it's the latter, the system should not or can not be changed to mitigate those consequences. But, every part of that is false by oversimplification.
> Today’s planetary ecological crisis is due first and foremost to the increasing scale of the capitalist world economy
This is sort of true except that there isn’t some significant alternative thing which is also getting people out of poverty and improving their material standards of living with things like more and more varied food and larger houses and manufactured goods and electrical lighting and smartphones and air conditioners and cars and office buildings and suchlike. There are a few small communist states (excluding China for having a mostly ‘capitalist world economy’ system just with a lot of state ownership and meddling) and some war-torn countries and a few failed states but these are not doing much climate change.
I think I would write that climate change is mostly caused by people getting richer and improving their material standards of living. (When the USSR was around being more communist, they were also causing climate change). When you put it like that, the idea which is hinted at (but not written down and maybe not really believed by the interviewee) of ‘just stop capitalism/economic growth’ translates to ‘freeze worldwide GDP per capita at its current level’ and means either keeping poor people at their very low standards of living or having people in western countries drop to a much lower standard of living such that others may come up, and that also ignores the future growing population.
Ignoring the obvious reasons that that idea is stupid, it’s worth noting that:
- richer countries have falling emissions (even when accounting for trade/outsourcing) and still manage to grow so wanting economic growth needn’t imply climate change.
- there is also an expected need to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere and suiciding the economy of rich countries is not going to be good for developing and paying for the solutions.
tldr; an okay summary of why we shouldn't expect system change to result in a better approach to the environment - extraordinary Soviet excesses, Chinese words vs reality; followed by a sui generis clarion call for system change. ?!?!?
I'm reminded of a recent study showing that autocratic systems lie and claim more than twice the economic growth they're actually getting; with China the lead liar. Includes a nice graph. You can believe the same is true of autocratic reports about how nice they are to the environment; because bad news isn't passed up the chain of command.
Frankly, most of the state of things, good and bad, is a direct result of capitalism and the particular algorithm by which it processes the values of every individual human into a single aggregate.
The reason why you don’t see that much pollution in your country is that it has been outsourced to other countries with more lax pollution laws and less worker protection laws. This means that fabrication of an item produces more pollution than if it was built in your country (where there’s more regulation). And then there’s even more pollution due to the long transportation haul.
But you get a cheaper price tag. And your rivers are clean.
Germany and the US also export a tremendous amount of goods, and do so without clogging up our rivers (and eventually the ocean) with trash.
And studies have shown that only 15% of China's CO2 emissions are for the production of exports. That means that 85% of their CO2 emissions are for local production. [1]
Lastly, the amount of economic value the US and other advanced nations produce per unit of Co2 is much higher than China, which is one of the least efficient from Co2 to value. [2]
The US exports cars, steel, cotton, natural gas, coal, plastics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and on and on.
On the note of pharmaceuticals and India, there’s a stark difference. Indian manufacturers dumb literal tons on antibiotics and their byproducts into rivers, and no US pharma company does this at all.
Can you back that up with evidence? I'm not sure what the situation is for Europe/the UK, but for the US it really doesn't seem to be the case that we are outsourcing our emissions:
I believe the “consumption-based CO2” graph used on the article, which is the main pillar, falls short on three accounts:
* It measures the CO2 it takes to constuct, but leaves (seems to leave out) the CO2 cost of transportation. When a TV has to travel around the world that cost isn’t trivial.
* The article focuses on CO2 exclusively. If a TV made in China produces about the same CO2 as one done on shore, all is good, even if the former involves (for example) dumping acid into a river, which would be illegal in the US. Even if we want to keep the discussion exclusively about climate change, other emissions must be taken into account. Methane for example is 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
* The whole part about it being “only” about 18% in the case of Europe (that’s a lot!) and that “it has not changed much in the last 30 years” (that makes it worse!)
Yes, but not to a sufficient degree that is congruent with the point people are trying to make (ie, that the outsourced emissions swamp the decrease in domestic emissions). Net emissions from the developed world -- in aggregate and per capita -- are declining.
In the same way that any imports involve extraterritorial emissions. The US manufacturers a lot of things and and does so with pretty good environmental standards compared to most other places.
At least for CO2, emissions haven’t been outsourced much. At least, emissions in developed countries are still falling when adjusting for trade. Most of the rising emissions in developing countries like China and India are due to them getting richer rather than becoming the worlds factories. I don’t know how other pollutants compare. Likely worse as they are not an issue for western companies to care about so much.
Not at all, no. You know whats short sighted tho? Skipping the part where i said we _all_ need to do our part and that there is pollution here as well, and jumping straight into deflecting the blame on to “us” while not doing enough.
We do carry some of the blame. But we are not responsible for local politicians all too happy to accept bribes and societies all too happy to close their eyes. Why are there no strong environmentalist movements in india? Is it a democracy or not? Cant people in china see whats happening with their rivers and cities? You cant possibly have one billion people sitting idle and doing nothing to change the status quo, and then shift the blame on us.
The fact that we all seem to agree that rich countries will pay a premium to keep their rivers clean seems to at the very least undermine the central argument of the article that capitalism places zero value on preserving the environment.
Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going?
The west is taking advantage of cheap labor in China and pushing all the externalities there. You're using a computer or smartphone that was presumably largely made in China to post this message.
To then turn around and say that climate change is entirely China's fault is absurd. You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products leading to the emissions.
You're also conflating localized pollution with co2 emissions.
Did the demand for products from polluting industry disappear in the developed world or did the factories just move overseas? Shifting blame to "underdeveloped and corrupt nations" does nothing to address the fact that developed countries still demand goods from polluting industry and do little to promote more sustainable forms of economic development.
There is no such thing as a polluting industry- or rather, any industry at all could be a polluting one. Pollution is a waste byproduct of what is being produced. The act of polluting is disposing of said byproducts in an unmanaged way (out smokestacks, into rivers, etc).
my take is that western and developed nations are just exporting all their problems to developing/manufacturing countries. it's not like europeans don't consume products that cause pollution, they just export the processes that create that pollution to other countries. if anything, europeans/americans are responsible for the majority of the pollution in china/india as a vast percentage of the goods produced end up being consumed in the western/developed nations anyway.
i think europeans should feel guilty when they see the disparity in pollution- norwegian streams and beaches may be clean but they can only do that because they import their goods from factories in other countries and send their oil to be burned elsewhere.
Western nations are generally very good hiding their dirty business out of sight. Exporting pollution to other countries is one thing. You see the same with animal farming. In China you see the bad treatment of animals in the open on markets where in the west we hide the same cruelty in locked down farms that most people never see. When we tell poorer countries to preserve wildlife we do this while we have eradicated all inconvenient wildlife in our own area.
Probably that China subsidizes the West’s efforts to green their economies while simultaneously handling our negative externalities, AND continuing to lift their population out of poverty.
The parent claim is that the developing world isn’t pulling their weight, which is an incredibly ignorant and frankly stupid take, considering any historical context.
> We keep blaming ourselves while underdeveloped and corrupt nations pollute virtually everything in the their management.
That literally sounds like supremacist, 'we are civilized' nonsense.
Those countries are literally the world's factories. Majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations. Except they are recorded as those countries emissions.
And the West arrogantly tries to sell them 'carbon credits' - another financial scam - have another country manufacture your products in sweatshops and have little emissions. Then make them buy 'carbon credits' from you.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that the "majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations"?
From what I've seen, the vast majority of the emissions/pollution from China and India are byproducts of them supporting their own citizens. It's not all exports. It's not majority exports.
That's kind of the point of the article: it's all capitalism. (Despite the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, it's run under "capitalism with Chinese characteristics".)
Capitalism is the reason we have climate change: the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost. Anybody who tries to incorporate that cost single-handledly will be at an economic disadvantage to somebody who doesn't, and capitalism will destroy the former and reward the latter.
That doesn't prescribe the solution, which is going to be a complex balance of millions of factors (both current and historical). Large, poor countries will have to play their parts, too.
But the lesson here is to identify what got us into this situation so that we can hope to find a way out. The free market caused it, and maybe it can be part of the solution -- but not unless there is also a non-free-market portion in which we all agree to stop treating the atmosphere as an infinite carbon sink.
It's only at that point that the real search for solutions can begin. But it's never going to happen while one country -- one of the largest carbon emitters both per-capita and collectively -- is unable to act because of enormous political influence from people who insist that it's a hoax.
>it's run under "capitalism with Chinese characteristics"
Not sure if you're using the quote to imply that's the position of the chinese government, but their line is "Socialism with Chinese characteristics"[1], not capitalism.
>Capitalism is the reason we have climate change: the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost. Anybody who tries to incorporate that cost single-handledly will be at an economic disadvantage to somebody who doesn't, and capitalism will destroy the former and reward the latter.
How do you explain the communist regimes out there that also consume fossil fuels?
What part of elected governments printing money and handing it out to large companies is the part where capitalism killed the environment?
We don't have capitalism as much as China isn't socialist or communist. We have corporate socialism with a tiny bread and circuses welfare state bolted on for optics. We have elected to annihilate our planet by decree.
It's not capitalism that people hate. It's humanity
